See this movie

I cannot recommend highly enough The Lives of Others.

But first, a confession: I harbor a tiny grudge against it deep, deep in my heart because I almost picked it to win best foreign language film at the Oscars in March and then went against my instincts (and with the conventional wisdom) and picked Pan's Labyrinth instead. If I'd trusted my gut, I would have won the whole pool instead of only three-way tie. To be fair, I guess that’s really not the movie's fault. And now that I love this movie, I’m shifting my tiny grudge over to Pan’s Labyrinth, which I still haven’t seen.

Anyway, this is a truly wonderful German film about a Stasi officer in East Germany in the early 1980s. He’s is tasked with spying on a playwright and his actress lover. He becomes more involved with them than he's supposed to, and the movie captures his transformation away from life as a singularly-focused intelligence officer. I don’t want to say too much about the plot points, but this is a beautiful movie about art, politics, and humanity and absolutely should be seen.